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eldavojohn writes "Groklaw is examining the possibility of an anti-ODF whisper campaign and the effects it has had on the ODF and OOXML Wikipedia articles. In the ODF article, Alex Brown bends the truth to make it seem like no one is supporting ODF, and that it is a flawed and incomplete standard. From the conclusion, 'So what is one to do? You obviously can't trust Wikipedia whatsoever in this area. This is unfortunate, since I am a big fan of Wikipedia. But since the day when Microsoft decided they needed to pay people to "improve" the ODF and OOXML articles, they have been a cesspool of FUD, spin and outright lies, seemingly manufactured for Microsoft's re-use in their whisper campaign. My advice would be to seek out official information on the standards, from the relevant organizations, like OASIS, the chairs of the relevant committees, etc. Ask the questions in public places and seek a public response. That is the ultimate weakness of FUD and lies. They cannot stand the light of public exposure. Sunlight is the best antiseptic.'"

Kind of sad how few Word processors there are these days.Even on your list at least four of them are based on the same code and two of them are Office.

I don't know that it's necessarily a bad thing. Word processors have a pretty big network effect, especially in business. So long as the same document format is rendered differently on different word processors (no matter how small that difference), there will be an incentive to standardize on a handful.

When have we seen any real innovation? It is like we got to Word and everything stopped. Than and most WP programs have become these huge monster applications that do more than 99% of their users need.

I agree, at this point the only thing to really innovate is making them smaller and more efficient. Dumping unnecessary functions into some sort of addon/extension system and slimming them down. As you note there isn't really a whole lot that the average word processor can't do and which people need.

Personally, while I have an old copy of MS Office XP, I haven't used it in years, except to export the files to an interoperable file format, and that wasn't much work, since I had so few of them.

So....we need a word processor version of Firefox! It really doesn't sound like a bad idea, especially if there was a standard plugin API that would work between different WPs. Then the competition could move on to innovation in the features provided by plugins. Vendors could sell packs of plugins the way that office suites are sold now.

When have we seen any real innovation? It is like we got to Word and everything stopped.

We haven't seen real innovation in a while. But, there's a good reason for that: First, there isn't a whole lot that a modern word processor can't do already. And second, major changes would, most likely, bring additional incompatibility, lowering the value added by the network effect.

In short, people just don't value many new features highly enough to give up the huge value that interoperability brings. It's pretty much the same reason it took so long to improve upon analog color TV. Sometimes "good enough

Anyone who wants good quality page layouts has to wrestle these programs to the ground and force them to do it. Try integrating drawings in your text with Word or OO, it is awful. Word 2003 plants a giant drawing canvas in the middle of the page. Laying out text with graphs and getting anything sensible looking is worse. Ask a typeface geek about typefaces. Ask Edward Tufte if default page layouts are anything approaching decent.

I know the fallback response is that most people don't care, or don't need proper page layout features, but that is just a chicken and egg argument. People have made due so long they no longer recognize the absurdities. Galileo published books in the 1600s that integrated text and pictures better than most modern word processing programs can.

They don't need to become full blown Pagenmaker-esque graphics hybrids, but there is whole lot of room to improve.

Try integrating drawings in your text with Word or OO, it is awful. Word 2003 plants a giant drawing canvas in the middle of the page. Laying out text with graphs and getting anything sensible looking is worse. Ask a typeface geek about typefaces. Ask Edward Tufte if default page layouts are anything approaching decent.

I'm not exactly saying that there isn't room for improvement in word processing. There is. But, for the vast majority of people, the benefit they receive from the network effect of having a widely-compatible word processor outweighs the benefits they would get from the improvements you mention.

If we could start over from scratch, and disregard all the network effect value in the current system, we could design, implement, and deploy a vastly improved word processor. But, as we can't just disregard all that

I have to agree. The oozing sores, and flop sweat that is MS office for mac becomes painfully obvious once you start trying to add charts and tables to any document (word, excel and powerpoint included).

Want to have columns that are a 0.4 inches wide? Forget about trying to just enter 0.4 into the column width cell, that doesn't actually work. You need to spend at least 10 min holding down the option key while grabbing the column with your mouse and moving it one pixel at a time.

When have we seen any real innovation? It is like we got to Word and everything stopped.

You make it sound as if MS Word was an improvement.
It probably was in some ways, but lots of people who used FrameMaker in the past
can tell you how much worse Word is, at least for long, technical documents.

WP 5.1 was much much better than word, even though is was not graphical. You could place tables and pictures exactly where you wanted them, and it knew that a caption is supposed to stay with the table or picture. Every word processor out there is rubbish compared to WP 5.1.

The thing is, almost any of the current word processors is perfectly adequate for documents that you create in it. And most of them are good enough to handle over, say, 97% of the documents created.

Toss in network effects, and the difficulties in converting a document created in one word processor into another word processor. (Margins handled slightly differently, different handling of tables of contents and indexes, alignment of images, etc.)

That would be because Word 4.0 for Mac did everything a word processor ever needs to do and did it well.

Did it also do the WordPerfect "Reveal Codes" feature? Because AFAIK only WordPerfect managed to get that right, and for some uses it is a hard requirement. The nearest equivalent to "Reveal Codes" would be writing it in LaTeX.

I'm truly looking forward to LyX 2.0 when it arrives soon. 1.6.3 is already solid, but 2.0 with XeTeX should really help it go far in expanding it's adoption. Kile 2.1 is almost here, then there is already TeXShop, TeXMaker and now TeXWorks to leverage.

Inovation doesn't have to mean bloat or even added features.You can simplify current features, increase performance, or even decrease memory footprint.I think the idea of a one size fits all program is just kind of silly. You have fourth graders using Word to write book reports about Harry Potter.I just have a problem when anything is held up as, it is as good as it gets.

So long as the same document format is rendered differently on different word processors (no matter how small that difference), there will be an incentive to standardize on a handful.

So long as people expect the same rendering on different machines, in different companies, there'll always be issues. The web had it right from the beginning: it's not the rendering that counts, its the structure. It doesn't matter if the heading is 20pt for your boss, or 50pt, for your other, visually impaired boss. It does

Oh yes.Just off the top of my head.Fleetstreet Writer.pfs:Write.QnA.WordStar.Write.WordPro.ProWrite.BankStreet Writer.PCWrite.XYWrite.Sprint.I could go on. There was also a time when we had many more spreadsheets as well.

Unless you tried Word Star in the late 80's you have never seen a word processor that wasn't a clone of WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. The first useable word processor. Everything since is a derivative work, bloated with so much useless crap it's hard to believe.

Ever notice how all spreadsheets use the same commands found in Lotus 2.3 for DOS? Same thing, derivative work.

On the other hand, there also is lots of support for MOO XML :
- Microsoft

Unfortunately this gives the impression that Microsoft supports Office Open XML but they don't. They plan to on the next version of MS-Office. They do support DOCX which is an ancestor of OOXML but they don't support OOXML itself. Neither does anyone else.

An update this year adds support for ECMA-376, an earlier version of OOXML standard, to Office 2007, but Microsoft won't support the ISO29500 specification until it releases its forthcoming Office 2010 technology. Office 2007 is the software that set off the controversy over document formats when Microsoft developed OOXML as its own XML-based file format for the suite.

I wouldn't use MS' ODF, last time I wanted to export ODF from MS Office, I used the plug in provided by Sun microsystems. I haven't used it lately, but it's up to version 3.1. Last version I used was 1.1.

Here is a simple study. [robweir.com]Any spec is going to have some ambiguity about how things should be handled in some cases, so compatibility will always depend, to some degree, on whether or not software authors want to be compatible with other implementations. As ODF matures, more of the details will get nailed down, and there should be less compatibility wiggle-room.

Isn't that one "read only" for some files ? Such as ODS (aka. spreadsheets) and possibly others (But ODS is the only one where I've heard of real problems).

MS has the source code for their implementation of whatever standard they're following at the moment (MOOXML possibly, or whatever), they have the specs for ODF (which, granted are incomplete for spreadsheets for *very good reasons*, look it up), *and* they have the source code. But being *MS* they somehow manage to generate something that's illegible.

Hmmm.

Disclaimer : I don't use MS stuff (or rather haven't for the last 15 yrs, I just use their OS to run games every now and then), I do switch small businesses *away* from Microsoft (successfully too, thanks to *ubuntu most of the time). It doesn't mean I have to know the intricacies of their software. I wish I could care but I don't have the time anymore. I just read the news.

We wouldn't accept such an incomplete standard from Microsoft. In fact, the rallying cry against OOXML was that it was "too complete" because it was X pages long.

It wasn't that it was too long that people complained. They complained because it enshrined errors that Microsoft had made in their earlier formats (wrong leap years for example). It also ignored existing standards (like how leap years are figured). Further it had things in the form of "Do like Word 95" rather than an actual definition of how.

ISO standards should respect and adhere to prior standards where they overlap rather than recreate it in an incompatible way. The leap year example shows how OOXML ignored existing standards.

For example they have their own vector graphics format (ODF just uses SVG), their own math mark up (ODF uses MathML), they have 4 completely different ways to mark up tables, depending on where they are (ODF I think has just 1. Maybe 2?).

Moreover, unlike ODF, the OOXML standards were not accompanied by a fully open-source reference implementation. Knowing exactly how existing applications read and write ODF documents goes a long way toward making up for any ambiguities.

I compared the ODF article to the OOXML article. The most striking difference is the "Criticism" sections of the ODF article is twice as long, and points out really minor stuff that hardly deserves inclusion in such a summary. On the other hand, the OOXML article fails to mention ANY of the major criticism that has gone across Slashdot in recent years, including Microsoft's paying off countries to support them on the standards committee, or how Microsoft purposely refuses to support the ODF standard in any useful way (I still import/export Word/Excel/PowerPoint, in Open Office - far less broken). There is also no mention that ODF is short, sweet, and nearly complete, while OOXML is Webster Dictionary sized, yet highly incomplete. The low complexity of an ODF implementation relative to OOXML is missing.

In short, we here on slashdot would write very different articles on the two formats. The gist would probably be:

Why is it remarkable to you that a list of criticisms about the objective technical merits of a proposed standard does not include items about the political actions of parties to the standardization process?

Did ReiserFS gain or lose functionality for the sole reason that the author committed a crime? Did any of Alan Turing's theories gain or lose logical validity due to his sexual orientation becoming revealed? Did the arguments of the civil rights movement become wrong when they engaged in some quid pro quo actions to gain exposure?

Conspicuously absent: Apple's "Pages" word processor. I'd happily pay Apple for a word processor that plays nicely on my PPC Mac, but I'll be damned if I'm going to lock my data into Yet Another Weird Apple Format. Seriously, what genius at Apple said "we have a 0% share of the word processing market - let's invent our own incompatible format so that no one can exchange data with us!"

It really shows how desperate a company is when they have to get the FUD written so they can refer to it as tho it were fact. Its just like "get the facts" which was show up as paid for information. How many times have we seen information come from Microsoft that states the truth but they leave out the relevant parts that make it the complete opposite of what they say. Rob Weir gives an example of Microsoft have 15 proposals for ODF 1.2 and Microsoft says none of them made it into ODF 1.2. All was true but

Maybe you could suggest the wiki entry be deleted. It doesn't sound like this guys posts have enough external reference points to hold itself up, and it doesn't sound like it is relevent enough to warrant a wiki article... There was a thing a while back about how wikipedia was clearing out those kind of entries. Just a thought.

A whisper campaign is when you tell outright lies in private that you would never dare to say in public, because they are so outrageously false that you would be immediately challenged on it.
Saying that Microsoft products are buggy, etc., is not a whisper campaign, because we can and do say this publicly without fear of contradiction.

Still a deception either way, right? The whisper campaign in the bar would not work if you announced who you worked for. It only works because the recipient of the whisper is kept from the entire truth.

It is a "whisper" campaign because if the same things were said out loud the speaker would be open to ridicule. Open to ridicule - because the comments are completely untrue, and the speaker is being deceitful.

If you speak out openly against someone or something and take whatever criticism comes - and rebut or retract, then it is not a whisper campaign.

I'm not at all saying that the wikipedia article is accurate... but I'd hardly say consulting the people who are behind the standards are the best ones to get an honest view of its stability, completeness, and real-world support. That's like turning to Larry Ellison and asking if Oracle is the best database in the world. Of COURSE he's going to pimp his own goods. I'd prefer to see people pointed to an independent third-party. Whether that be a forum full of users, or large corporations who have standardized on it in the business sector.

The latest published standard version of ODF (1.1) is flawed - perhaps the most frequently mentioned flaw is that it does not define a syntax for spreadsheet formulas. An ODF 1.1 compliant spreadsheet application can thus generate ODF 1.1 compliant spreadsheet documents that are incompatible with other ODF 1.1 spreadsheet applications.

When completed, ODF 1.2 will fix this flaw and others. But ODF 1.2 is not yet finished.

Which conveniently omits that ODF was submitted under PAS - the process for reviewing and approving something that's already a standard and is already in use. ODF officially started the standardization process in OASIS in December of 2002, starting from the StarOffice format.

As for OASIS's track record, I refer you to http://www.oasis-open.org/specs/ [oasis-open.org] that lists the standards they've originated. These include DocBook and a large number of SOAP-related standards. That's hardly "no track record at all". And their heavy concentration in XML-based standards makes them a good place for another XML-based standard.

Raven - I appreciate your attempt to enlighten me on the subject. I found your information interesting enough to stimulate me to do a little research of my own. I thought you may be interested to learn that your assumption that there was some kind of equality or similarity in the way that the ODF and OOXML standards were vetted and approved is mistaken. It turns out that there was a vast difference between the two different track taken through the standards approval process for ODF and OOXML. Turns out that

Raven - while I was at it, I would like to bring something else to your attention, as I fear that your sources of information may not be the best. You say...

"The [ODF] standard at this version was a little over 700 pages, meaning that the reviewers working every day would have had to review around 4 pages per day; more if they didn't work weekends. This is far from enough time to be able to do a detailed review."

Now in light of my response and the other submitter's observation debunking any lack of attenti

If you take as a criteria for a "good standard for office documents" that it have a number of interoperable implementations and provides all generally-required functionality, ODF clearly meets that standard, MSOOXML as clearly fails it on lack of interoperable implementations.

Neither standard is perfect, and there are bugs in the various ODF implementations, but it's obviously usable, as it's being widely used. Not even MS Office actually uses OOXML as documented.

If you take as a criteria for a "good standard for office documents" that it have a number of interoperable implementations and provides all generally-required functionality, ODF clearly meets that standard, MSOOXML as clearly fails it on lack of interoperable implementations.

Many of these implementations don't implement the standard as published, or add extensions. If most implementations (or the most widely used ones) deviate from or extend the published standard, the published standard is less useful an

Weir's tests of MS's ODF implementation made a big point of the fact that if you saved a spreadsheet in OO, and read it with Office, it was not fully functional (you get the cell values, but not the formulas, so it becomes a static snapshot of the data).

Yet Lotus Symphony has almost exactly the same problem [lotus.com]. Weir got around that by using a beta of a future version of Symphony that fixes the problem.

Exactly. Show me a version of MS Office that does this right, whether beta or released, and I'll gladly update the table. I want interoperability far more than I want to complain about Microsoft Office.

People like to feel important. Someone comes up to you and says, "Look, I'm going to give you some inside information on XYZ." You feel like you've been given a valuable stock tip or a lead on the Next Big Thing. But in reality, everyone is getting the same story, just like that e-mail from the Nigerian Minister of Finance.

Its an old marketing ploy that smart people recognize. Unfortunately, being smart isn't a prerequisite for becoming a PHB. But being susceptible to having one's ego stroked is.

I remember that the Budweiser [wikipedia.org] article read like a marketing brochure one time, but it appears to have been cleaned up. The worst offender I've seen is the Debeers [wikipedia.org]. I went there once after reading an article about successful marketing of diamonds for wedding rings in Japan, and was shocked to find that it didn't even have a history page (it now does). Revisions of the article from it's early days gave me a pretty good idea of it's history. You can see a great deal of controversy via it's talk page [wikipedia.org].

"You obviously can't trust Wikipedia whatsoever in this area. [...] But since the day when [somebody] decided they needed to [...] "improve" the [...] articles, they have been a cesspool of FUD, spin and outright lies, seemingly manufactured [...]"

Across the US and EU.Gov/.Mil "Open" is co-opted by corporatist (anti-Capitalist) for lying, scamming, hooking, and injuring "Open" market reputation, customers, products, businesses, foundations.... It is very misleading, and should be at least a crime of anti-trust or fraud for MS-Gates and others to use the capitalized term "Open" to imply any product or model qualities/values. A local military CIO... (2008) even implied that I was Doctor Frankenstein for recommending the use of "Open" architectures an

Also interesting is the fact that, as far as I can tell, these "shills" are editing Wikipedia with their real names, or with well-known handles uses elsewhere that identify who they are. As opposed to "WackyButterfly1965" or something - not a particularly hard thing to do on Wikipedia at all.

Facts. Presented out of context (or without enough of it) have been used extensively on Wikipedia and

And then sending that information to national standards committees to argue against the adoption of ODF, and to other government officials. Yes, I think that when you use this mechanism to deceive governments (or any other customers for that matter) it is scandalous. Marketing/spin is one thing. But outright lies and deception is something else, don't you think?

It actually takes no work at all. All one has to do is make a positive remark about Windows and BAM! -1. My mother is very proud that I think for myself and don't blindly "hate the man" just because it's the cool thing to do. I've outgrown that paranoia. I'm the fanboi? Sif. I comprehend what's going on here just fine - look at the mod! Just because you're so smart doesn't mean you're in the majority. I work on a Mac btw. I use Windows sparingly and have a linux machine that I loaded just to do it to see what all the fuss was about. I'm an anti-fanboi and that's the reason for the attitude. So your critique has missed its mark. Given the environment this is oh so expected.

Well, you're right that there's an definite anti-windows attitude here, which means poorly supported comments about windows are more likely to get modded down than similarly deserving comments about Linux. I think you'll find, though, that if your comments are relevant and you back them with evidence you'll get modded up - or at least not modded down.

When someone makes an off-topic comment about Linux, just ignore it instead of answering and getting modded down, and things will balance out when you have mo